Author: James Aylett

Thankfully I don’t have a niece called Maddy, nor a set of golf clubs.

So I’m largely moved into my new flat, and in the process am having (as usual when I move) great fun with poor television reception. When I moved to Cirencester, I could only reliably receive BBC 2; when I moved to the last house in Cambridge, Channel 5 showed strong but BBC 1 was dodgy. And so forth.

In my new flat I can get BBC 1.

Nothing else; that’s it. And it’s not very good reception. Actually, it’s not quite that straightforward – on Thursday evening I got pretty good BBC 2 and Channel 5, poor ITV and C4, and almost non-existent BBC 1. Since I’m supposed to get good coverage for FreeView, and Channel 5 always used to be the yardstick for FreeView capability, I went out and bought a tiny and ugly black box, at which point everything turned around so I could get BBC 1 through normal broadcast, and the FreeView box was able to detect everything else, but solidly refuses to show anything except Sky News.

My flat is clearly trying to introduce an unwanted bias into my news consumption.

I don’t really have anything against Sky News (except for grammar, spelling, clarity, research and use of the English language); bias is a part of life, and should be embraced on all sides. I was planning to do this with, say, BBC News 24 plus some healthy website reading: a bit of Al Jazeera, some CNN, Press Association video feeds, that sort of thing. Except I can’t receive BBC News 24 (FreeView is trying to pick it up from Alexandra Palace, which I always associate with a computer game in the late 80s for some reason), and I don’t have an internet connection yet.

It’s a little difficult to be embraced on all sides by bias when you only have Sky News.

The cynic in me wants to claim this makes me feel like an American. The realist accepts that I can’t get good enough steak for that.

Book training for scroll users (from a Norwegian comedy show).

While cleaning out the house, I discovered two empty bottles of wine. Presumably I saved the bottles in lieu of bothering to write down that I liked them, but as I wanted to throw them into the recycling box, I had to write them down somewhere – they went into a calendar entry on work’s email system, but that’s being turned off today. So I’ll put them here instead, on the basis that even if this blog disappears at some point, the contents will remain in Grandfather Google for all eternity.

They were a Rioja called Faustino V, which I do actually remember being rather nice (and so not saved for historical reasons because it wiped out an African tribe or something), and a Chateauneuf-du-Pape from Chateau Mont-Redon, which I remember nothing about but seems to be rated highly.

My latest excuse for being silent here is that I’ve been moving house, from the ivory towers of Cambridge to the gas towers of North Greenwich. (Okay so Cambridge’s towers are few and resolutely stone, but it’s been some years since gas was processed on the Greenwich Peninsula either.)

I am now largely settled into my new flat, but today I returned to Cambridge to clean. I hadn’t realised quite how many plastic bottles there were hiding in cupboards, nor cardboard boxes lurking beneath the stairs; these all have been found temporary homes in appropriate bins, leaving me to get down to serious hoovering, dusting and other ways of ousting spiders.

The thing is, I just can’t bring myself to hoover the buggers up. Firstly, I figure it’s a little unfair to pick on them simply because they’re much smaller and have an insufficient amount of friction compared to the sucking power of my Dyson. Secondly, they scare the hell out of me. It’s not the eight legs (I don’t find The Corrs scary), and it’s probably not the furry legs (I don’t find Ray Mears scary). Cooms was pretty frightening, so maybe it’s the compressible legs. I can’t really imagine it’s anything other than the legs, although they have weird eyes, and Elton John is a bit frightening at times.

So anyway a large part of the afternoon consisted of hoovering up a bit of web, waiting for the spider to move on, then hoovering up some more. Oh, and cussing – because when they move they lay more web, like some organic silk railroad machine.

As it turned out, the cussing was good practice, because the trains back to London tonight are awkward, and full of annoying people talking loudly about Britney Spears.

I dreamed we did a show where I sang a song about the romantic impact of Google search. Then my lover turned from a man into a woman, and we resolved the remaining plot points by doing the entire show again in a minute.

Truly my mind is a strange place to be right now; on the plus side I watched the first five episodes of Grey’s Anatomy last night (in my usual behind the times way) and loved every minute. So strange but contentedly full of medical jargon. I haven’t felt like this since 1995.

Did I have a conversation about martial arts on film with someone last night, or did I dream it?

So about six weeks ago the company I work for was bought by DoubleClick, probably the largest technology company in our particular niche industry (digital advertising and marketing). On Friday, it was announced that Google has agreed to buy DoubleClick (article chosen because it is a reasonably good non-corporate background for anyone who has no idea what I’m talking about but is interested).

I’m not actually concerned in the slightest. I have no idea what it all means, but I’ve spent seven years in an industry where the entire focus of a technology company can change in under a month, so I’m used to that. I just hope it stops now, so I don’t have to keep on re-adjusting my list of things to think about. (No one is likely to buy Google, so I’m pretty safe there.)

Anyway, I’m off to enjoy the sun for a bit. Shower some pity on James, who has spent most of this weekend inside, running auditions for Tony Blair the Musical.

You may not have noticed my quiescence, because frankly James’ is much more of a shock. I’m amazed he’s been able to hold it in this long; entire weeks have passed with no post from him at all. Incredible.

However I have also been quiet, and probably will continue to be so for a while. I’m currently in New York, sitting in someone else’s office (where the lights are on a motion sensor, so every so often they turn off, leaving me in darkness until I flap my arms around). This is “head office”, the nerve centre of DoubleClick, my current employers. In some ways it’s much like the London office I’m based in (which was until recently a separate company); the people are passionate, generally have a good sense of humour, all good stuff – but there are a few key differences…

• many more people, to a quiet terrifying extent; I could probably walk the corridors here for a week and still not have passed everyone (possibly because they’d be sat down working, not walking the corridors)
• everyone seems to be married; probably a surprise only because Tangozebra has a disproportionate number of people who aren’t (draw your own conclusions)
• lots more whiteboards – as someone who loves whiteboards, and has been campaigning internally to get lots more, I’m really encouraged to see them around, not quite flocking, but at least in enough numbers that once the humans go home they can be gregarious, the way whiteboards should be

Damn, the light’s gone out again. Off to flap.

Leading (technology) blogger Kathy Sierra has received death threats and sexual and violent intimidation both in comments on her own blog and elsewhere. As a result she’s pulled out of a speaking/training engagement – I can only hope that the people responsible are found, and that she can in time regain some normalcy in her life.

My reaction to this is horror, but as I think about it, death threats, intimidation and inciting people to take matters into their own hands – despite the law – is what the UK tabloid press does best. It’s awful that the blogging world has got to this point… awful, but perhaps not surprising.

I think people too often forget that the reason these things happen is that we are all people, and some people (quite a lot, as it happens) don’t really respect everyone else. (Indeed, it’s doubtful anyone ever respects everyone else.) That this hasn’t happened in high profile blogging circles before certainly doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened in blogs (there’s a lot that hides in the long tail); it has, after all, happened in one way or another throughout all of human history. We are mean people, and we do mean things.

Tim Bray, most often a fount of sanity and reasoned thought, calls for more information to be dug up, which while valuable still seems to fall into the trap of believing that blogging is its own society, and that we can police it internally. We cannot. Increasingly bloggers aren’t even a separate community; blogging has become too broad, too common, too intertwined with too many people’s lives – it is just another tool in the wider world. Saying that something is badly out of control and needs to be fixed, urgently, as Bray does, suggests that this is something internal to the blogging community, which it absolutely is not. The demons came in with us, and they won’t leave until we leave: tackling them inside the small room of the web will at most damage the furniture.

If we want this to stop happening, it has to be tackled out in society, in the real world. I’m not convinced that this is even possible, although of course that doesn’t mean we should not try as hard as possible.

(Anyone find any women-at-risk charities in the United States? Google fails me…)